Decoupling Explained
FreeIf you're interested in decoupling Drupal, there's a good chance you've heard at least some of the buzz in the Drupalverse about "headless" or decoupled Drupal. Or perhaps you watched Dries' keynote from DrupalCon Barcelona or read Dries' blog post about the future of decoupled Drupal. Whatever the case may be, this tutorial and the ones that follow will walk you through building a simple decoupled blog. In Dries' terminology the demo site we'll be building is "fully decoupled." While it would be trivial to adopt similar techniques to build a progressively decoupled site, let's dig a bit deeper into what it means to build a decoupled Drupal site.
Andrew Berry, from Lullabot, has written a great article asking Should you Decouple? Like most architectural decisions there are trade-offs to consider with a decoupled approach. Let's take a look at some of the pros and cons of a decoupled approach. Is it the right choice for your project?
At this point, whether we've decided to use a third-party pre-rendering service or we've written our own isomorphic JavaScript application to serve as the front-end of our website, our hosting requirements have definitely gotten more complex. Let's take a look at the continuum of decoupled site architectures and start to come up with a list of things to keep in mind when considering their hosting requirements.
Today's Drupal developer needs more than just a text editor and FTP. Best practice Drupal development involves a suite of tools, processes, and more than one server environment.
This tutorial is directed toward an audience that is not familiar with best practices in Drupal Development and methods involving version control with Git, IDEs, local development environments, and deployment environments (i.e. stage, live). Here we're providing a high-level overview of these topics with links to dive deeper if you need more information.
In this tutorial, we'll cover:
- Introduce Version Control Systems such as Git
- Discuss how Git can be used to deploy to remote web servers
- Review programming-centric text editors and Integrated Development Environments
- Identify the need for a local development environment.
- Explain shared deployment environments including production and stage.
Patches are used to describe modifications made to one or more code files, and can be used to share those changes.
Develop Drupal Sites
GuideEntities are the fundamental building blocks that make up any Drupal site. Having a good understanding of the Entity system is an important part of ensuring the data model of your Drupal site is set up properly.
Modules are bundles of primarily PHP code that extend Drupal in order to add new features or alter existing functionality.
Drush is the command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal. The most common way to install Drush is to install it on a per-project basis using Composer. We'll walk through the steps to do that, as well as how to set up the Drush Launcher tool (to make it possible to execute Drush commands without having to specify a full path to the executable).
In this tutorial we'll:
- Install Drush
- Verify it worked
By the end of this tutorial you'll have Drush installed.
Installing Drupal using the instructions in this tutorial will give you a working Drupal site that can be used for learning, or real-world project development.
Before you can work on a Drupal site locally (on your computer), you'll need to set up a local development environment. This includes all the system requirements like PHP and a web server, that Drupal needs in order to run. Our favorite way to accomplish this is using DDEV.
In this tutorial we'll learn:
- How to install and configure DDEV for use with a Drupal project.
- How to use DDEV's integrated Composer to download Drupal and Drush.
- How to install Drupal inside DDEV so you can access the site and start doing development.
By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to set up a local development environment for learning Drupal or working on a new Drupal project.